Progress! Angular has now been updated from 6.0.8 to 6.2.9! But why did it not install that in the first place? I told it to install @latest.

I was really confused. I decided to attempt to install the latest version explicitly instead of through @latest. According to Wikipedia (since I couldn’t find it anywhere else), the latest stable release is 7.2.4

The launch of this blog gives me the opportunity to discuss my development environment.

My development environment has not changed much over the 20 years of my career. I started out as an intern in 1998 right around the release of Visual Basic 6. My first job was VB6 using a SQL Server backend.

Since then I moved to C# but continued to work with Visual Studio and SQL Server throughout their subsequent upgrades. Right now my environment looks like this:

Windows (7 at my day job, 10 at home)

Visual Studio (2015 Pro at work, 2017 Community at home) with ReSharper

SQL Server Express (only at home)

SQL Management Studio (again only at home)

I have used this environment to build ASP.NET MVC apps, WPF apps, Windows Forms app, ASP.NET Web Forms apps, and Xamarin mobile apps. While it has served me well, I am wanting to shift towards more of a free/open source environment.

The main reason I want to do this is for app development. As you probably know, you have to have a Mac if you want to build iPhone apps. You can do all the development on another machine but you have to have a Mac of some kind to build, test, or deploy.

I worked on mobile apps at a previous position. The Mac requirement meant I was walking around with 2 machines. I had my Alienware laptop for development and then a low end MacBook Pro for when I needed to test or deploy the iPhone app. I would love to be able to have one machine to do it all, which means I have to find a way to do my development on a Mac.

Luckily Microsoft has really embraced open source over the last few years. This makes it possible for me to stick with C#/.NET while not being tied to Windows anymore.

Here is the development environment I am going to be using for the projects I write about on this blog.

Windows 10 (For now. I will be looking to get a Mac in the near future to fully make the transition.)

VSCode

MySQL

I will use these programs to build .NET Core applications. I am also using this as an excuse to finally learn Angular.

I have tried to make this transition a few times in the past but have been tripped up by a couple things.

No ReSharper in VSCode – I have come to rely on this plugin a lot, which is probably not a good thing. It will probably be good for me to get away from it. I just have to push through the initial frustration.

The command line – It is going to take me some time to get used to doing things through the command line.

These hang-ups are not too much for me to overcome if I just resolve to do it. So that is what I am going to do.